“Advocates of a plan to use railroad lines in Northern Colorado for passenger service will meet Sunday to raise both awareness and money to push their transit proposal forward. Front Range On Track, a group that has assumed a low profile since its formation three years ago, is leveraging some of the attention paid recently to similar rail plans in Boulder County and north metro-Denver to draw some to its own efforts.”

Most appealing to me with this northern Colorado rail transit plan is that it makes no kinky detour to Boulder, unlike the FasTracks Northwest Corridor with its thoroughly impractical Longmont-Boulder spur. A Longmonter could travel by rail to downtown Denver or Denver International Airport a heck of a lot faster by making use of the proposed FROT route shown on the left rather than by RTD’s northwest run-around.

Of course, at this stage of the process there are a myriad of legal and financial questions to be resolved, including the issue of whether Longmont could wholly or partially remove itself from paying into the RTD FasTracks equation.

At the very least, the FROT proposal gives Longmont the opportunity to be a part of a practical rail transit solution, a dose of hope we can certainly use of late.